Funding Palooza, Knausgård, New York, FEMA, Hyrule
Lux Recommends #463
The city is back, FEMA is out, and what we’ve lost by going digital. Plus revisiting Jonathan Haidt on American structural stupidity and the post-Babel world.
From Lux Capital
First, happy Juneteenth weekend. It’s going to be a scorcher here in NYC with record-high temps starting on Monday.
It was a week of mega-fundraises and mega-valuations for our Lux portfolio companies. Among them:
Ramp has raised its valuation to $16 billion in its latest funding round, where it brought in $200 million led by Founders Fund. The NYC-based fintech firm offers tools that automate expense management, bill payment, accounting, and more.
Applied Intuition, which makes intelligence software for autonomous vehicles, raised $600 million in a round co-led by BlackRock and Kleiner Perkins, valuing it at $15 billion. I interviewed co-founders Qasar Younis and Peter Ludwig on company building last year for the Riskgaming podcast in, “How Applied Intuition used the Valley’s hardest lessons to upgrade automotive with autonomy.”
Finally, Maven AGI, an AI platform for customer service operations, has raised $50 million in Series B funding led by Dell Technologies Capital.
I’m going to be honest, I am probably forgetting a few, but it’s always nice when there are so many fundraises that it’s hard to keep track.
From around the web
1. Digital drift
I’ll kick off this week with a beautiful meditation by Karl Ove Knausgård in Harpers on what we’ve lost by trading deep but circumscribed lives in the real world for shallow but vast digital existences.
Throughout history it’s been said that mathematics is the language of nature, but I couldn’t even grasp something as simple as the relationship between the language of mathematics and the laws of the physical world. If numbers were abstract and math was derived from fundamental axioms, it would be a closed system, and in that case how could it describe and calculate the most breathtakingly complex events in the natural world—which weren’t abstract at all?
2. Publish or perish
Today, the phrase “research university” feels somewhat redundant. But a new article by Clara Collier in Asterisk Magazine points out that, for most of their history, universities weren’t for research at all. Rather, the research university is a contingent product of scores of different pressures all mounting at once. H/t Lux’s scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman.
Everyone agreed that German universities needed to change. But very few people thought that this should involve making them centers of free intellectual inquiry. Instead, Enlightenment critics wanted them to be useful. A scholar of the 17th century might have called the university an intellectual res publica, an independent body politic. By the second half of the 18th, he was much more likely to use the word factory. Even Immanuel Kant — in an essay defending the pursuit of pure knowledge! — called universities places where scholars were gathered fabrikenmäßig: as if in a factory. At the time, this was a good thing. Factories, unlike universities, were efficient and modern. Above all, they were beneficial to the state.
3. The city that never stops
As primary voting for New York’s mayoral race kicks off, Laurence recommends writing for Vital City. Rumors of the city’s demise are greatly exaggerated.
It is of course true that New York has many problems. But any honest look at the state of New York would also reveal a city that has largely recovered from the dislocations of the pandemic, a time when violence increased and many fled the city for greener pastures. The latest statistics are, by and large, good ones for New York. Crime — not all categories, but most — is down. The economy is strong and unemployment is significantly reduced from the heights of 2020. The city’s population is growing again.
But these facts don’t seem to captivate the public square. Unfortunately, the incentives that govern the behavior of headline writers, politicians and activists all point in the direction of alarmism.
4. Gone with the windstorm
What is terminal, though, is FEMA. This month, Trump said he’d phase it out as soon as hurricane season is over. Although the department does have its problems, we’ll all likely miss it when it is gone. I’d direct you to Zoë Schlanger’s piece in The Atlantic for a good breakdown of why.
Poorer states and states that rarely see disasters will inevitably be most vulnerable to FEMA’s total absence. Arizona, for example, has received among the fewest FEMA funds in recent years, in part because it isn’t in the path of hurricanes and recent wildfires have not burned as ferociously there as in other western states. But that means the state is ill-prepared for a low-probability but high-devastation event, as The Arizona Republic recently noted. If and when Arizona’s luck runs out, it may not have the infrastructure or the funds to manage the crisis alone.
5. Take Ctrl
Sam enjoyed a manifesto in Ink and Switch on the need to create a new world of malleable software, where users can individually manipulate their digital workspaces as easily as they would their physical ones.
Environments matter. To do our best work and live our best lives, we need spaces that let us each express our unique potential.
A guitar maker sets up their workshop with their saws, hammers, chisels and files arranged just so. They can also build new tools as needed to achieve the best result—a wooden block as a support, or a pair of pliers sanded down into the right shape.
…These days, we spend more and more of our time in environments built from code, not atoms. We’ve gained many capabilities in this shift—we can collaborate instantly across continents and search thousands of files in an instant. But we’re also losing something important: the ability to adapt our environments and make them our own.
6. Lost in the flow
Finally, for Zelda Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom fans, the video below on the rivers of Hyrule may be the best 30 minutes of your week.
